Political will to adopt laws that recognize women’s reproductive health in the country has been lacking, with many of the laws borrowing heavily from the customary laws of communities in the country.

For many years, women have resorted to crooked means of terminating their pregnancies. They have often had their insides poked with sharp objects such as knitting needles, coat hungers, sticks and anything that could induce premature labour sometimes resulting to permanent infertility.

Some quack doctors administer drugs such as quinine to begin the process hence major complications arising from unsafe abortions. Teenagers aged below 19 accounts for a quarter of these uncouth street abortions.

Statistics available in the country shows that annually 200 adult women in the country are likely to die from complications that accrue from unsafe abortions.

According to Dr Josephine Moyo senior program advisor to IpasAfrica Alliance. It’s all about the autonomy given to women to make their own decisions

She says women should be educated about unsafe abortion. The current law is a social injustice against women.

“We have lost assertiveness, we need to look at the reality on the ground” and the women parliamentarians should be helpful in this matter.

“There are no short cuts, we need to challenge social norms that degrade women and deny them their fundamental human rights,” she said

Sometime in the year the media carried a story of a girl who had thrown her newborn baby into a pit latrine in Nyahururu. Her sole reason after pleading guilty to the charge was that she couldn’t afford to look after two children.

Not far from Nyahururu, another woman in Kerugoya was jailed for three years for killing and throwing her baby in a pit latrine because she couldn’t afford to maintain the new born for she had no job and had other three dependants.